Why does God do such things?
Second Sunday after Christmas, 2nd January, 2005
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Over a decade ago I arrived to have dinner with a friend to find him huddled, almost foetal, on his loungeroom floor with several sheets of paper splayed out in front of him. I asked him what was wrong. He announced, simply, that Stuart Challander, the Australian orchestral conductor, had died. I had no idea that my friend knew Stuart Challander, but he was heavily involved in the arts, so I was not all that surprised. Challander had died of AIDS and his death, as I subsequently discovered, was a lead item in that evening's news.
I thought it best not to leave my friend alone in such a state, so I gave him space by going to another living area at the back of the house, fixing myself a drink and waiting for him to emerge. After about thirty minutes he did so. He apologised for the state he was in and explained to me that he hadn't actually known Challander particularly well, but that news of his death had prompted him to write out the names of everyone he knew who had died of AIDS. After filling three foolscap pages he still had not finished, but he found he just couldn't go on. He then told me that he, too, was HIV positive.
Why does God do such things? How can people be walking down a sunny beach enjoying a holiday with family, friends, lovers, and the next minute be washed out to sea with virtually no warning? How can an entire village, even an entire city, be flattened by an earthquake and then wiped from the face of the earth, with almost no evidence of life remaining? Doesn't God care that so many people have suffered and are suffering, through no fault of their own?
Mass death through war or terrorism is comparatively easy to explain – fallen humanity acting cruelly in sin. Even an illness like HIV some good Christian people have tried to rationalise into being the fault of the victim: which of course it isn't. But for some folk at least, such arguments allow them to let God off the hook by blaming human beings. But what about earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, and other natural disasters that destroy without discrimination and without warning, people who have done nothing more sinful than to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The Psalms of the Old Testament are full of such cries to God: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" "O God, why do you cast us off for ever?" The book of Job is one long lament for the fickleness of the human condition, in which humanity seems to be little more than the puppet plaything of a perverse, even fetishistic deity. Time and again the people of Israel are carted off into slavery, their homes, their livelihoods, their families destroyed, and sometimes the prophets and the people cry out that God seems not to care. And so often we leave aside these sections of Scripture, the "nasty bits", because they seem not to speak to we comfortable westerners who are so in control of our world and our destiny.
Yet every now and then they still make sense.
But the question remains: Doesn't God care? And why do apparently random "acts of God" occur? Is it God's punishment against a faithless people? Some Old Testament prophets would doubtless have said so; but I think not. For the cries of despair of the Old Testament prophets are answered by the extraordinary reading which we heard as today's Gospel, and which underlines the Christmas season. The Word – God – became flesh. He has experienced what we experience. When those tens of thousands died, God died with them. While those hundreds of thousands suffer hunger and misery, God is there with them, in the muck. This is not the distant puppeteer God of Job, but the close, walking with us on the road and even dying with us God of Jesus Christ. We like to dress up Christmas as a time of warm fuzzies, and so we are perhaps doubly shocked when such a disaster as this occurs at this time of the year. Yet in an odd way it is only the message of Christmas that can make any real sense of what has happened. God did not "do it", rather, just as surely as it has been done to the least, it has been done to him. Immortal, ineffable, all-powerful, almighty – yes, but also a baby surrounded by slaughter, a refugee, and one who died an unspeakably cruel death.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this current disaster is its size – so many people over such a wide geographic area and of so many nationalities. Yet the stories that hit home tend to be the individual ones – of the person we know or knew, of the people in the place we used to visit, of the abandoned child, with no relatives left in the world, starving on our television screen. This disaster, as every disaster, is in fact a series of many many personal disasters, personal stories of pain and death. It was the death of a vague acquaintance that opened the floodgates of grief for my friend who had already been to so very many funerals. It may be a single story or a single person who will open each of our hearts to the pain and grief of millions. It is also the story of one child born long ago which brings home to us that God does care – enough to take on our flesh and to die for us and with us. Perhaps the incarnation of Jesus Christ might help us just a little to understand – not that it will all be ok, but that we, and more importantly all those who suffer, are not alone in grief and pain.
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